The World Health Organisation must recommit to the democratic principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Reuters)
According to a World Health Organisation news release, the WHO’s 78th World Health Assembly adopted the Pandemic Agreement by consensus (rather than by a vote) on 20 May 2025. This followed hot on the heels of the adoption of amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHRs) at the 77th assembly on 1 June 2024 through Resolution WHA77.17. Countries had been negotiating for amendments to the IHRs under the Working Group on Amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005), and under the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) for the Pandemic Agreement.
But health freedom advocates are deeply concerned that in one or both instances, the WHO has broken its own rules for negotiating and voting for its legal instruments. As I explained elsewhere, the WHO’s own rules in Article 55 (2) of the International Health Regulations (2005) require that state parties be accorded a minimum of four months to consider any proposed amendments to the Regulations. This meant that in the run-up to the 77th assembly which commenced on 27 May 2024, the deadline for the WHO director-general to submit such proposals to the WHO’s member states was 27 January 2024.
However, as Dr Silvia Behrendt explains, “A new official version was published on April 17, 2024, containing numerous previously unknown provisions. Further changes followed in a May 20, 2024 version and finally in the adopted June 1 version — none of which were properly notified within the required time … Even the WHO Secretariat previously acknowledged that without a final draft by the end of January, only a status report — not a vote — should occur.”
In the run-up to the 77th assembly, David Bell, Silvia Behrendt, Amrei Muller, Thi Thuy Van Dinh and others wrote an Open Letter to the WHO pointing out that according to the Terms of Reference (para.6) of the IHR Review Committee (2022), the deadline for the Working Group on the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) to submit a draft set of amendments for state-parties to consider was January 2024 in line with Article 55(2) of the IHRS. They further observed that although the draft WHO Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the IHRs contained significant health, economic and human rights implications, they were being negotiated outside official procedures by the various committees.
Furthermore, the authors of the Open Letter to the WHO observed that the draft amendments to the IHRs had been developed with unusual haste on the premise that there was a rapidly increasing urgency to mitigate pandemic risk. This, as they pointed out, was despite the fact that the alleged high risk of a pandemic in the short-to-medium term had been shown to be contradicted by the data and citations on which WHO and other agencies had relied.
The authors were alluding to the WHO’s contention that shortening the four-month statutory window for countries to review proposed amendments to the IHRs was justifiable on the grounds that due to “climate change” and other drivers of zoonotic spillover, the risk of another spillover from animals to humans was very high. In other words, the WHO was using under-substantiated assumptions of an imminent “existential threat” to justify sidestepping official procedures.
Thus some health freedom advocates hold that the WHO’s assumption of increased risk of pandemics relies on a weak evidence-base, demonstrated by a University of Leeds report illustrating that the risk of outbreaks is not growing, and may even be decreasing. As the report argues, the impression of increasing outbreaks could be reasonably attributed to significant improvements in detection and diagnostic technology as well as reporting mechanisms.
Moreover, analysis of the evidence used by WHO and others gave much longer outbreak risk profiles, highlighting inconsistencies between WHO estimates and the research estimates in their cited evidence. All this undermines the WHO’s justifications for side-stepping its own procedures.
Furthermore, according to Dr Behrendt, there were violations of voting procedures for the amendments to the IHRs at the 77th assembly, including lack of transparency, lack of quorum verification, and non-compliance with essential rules. In a correspondence, someone involved with the processes of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) confirmed Dr Behrendt’s contention, stating: “I think the Article 55 concerns are legitimate. Before the IHR vote, when it was clear that the Pandemic Agreement would not be approved [at the 77th WHA in 2024], the WHO moved the Coordinating Financing Mechanism (CFM) from Article 20 of the INB draft text to the IHRs as its primary financing mechanism. It is nearly word for word and done at the last minute. Some countries only had hours to review and think through the implications of the CFM before the vote. It put some countries at a disadvantage.”
Thus the hasty adoption of the amendments to the IHRs on 1 June 2024 appears to be a violation of procedural justice, as it caused disadvantage to countries with limited resources requisite for an adequate interrogation of the amendments before the vote.
Furthermore, some health freedom advocates hold that the negotiations for the Pandemic Agreement have also been shot through with violations of procedure. Article 19 of the WHO’s Constitution states: “The Health Assembly shall have authority to adopt conventions or agreements with respect to any matter within the competence of the Organization. A two-third vote of the Health Assembly shall be required for the adoption of such conventions or agreements, which shall come into force for each member when accepted by it in accordance with its constitutional processes.”
In early 2024, the WHO released a revised draft of the Pandemic Agreement dated 13 March 2024, less than three months before the 77th assembly in which it was to be considered, again to the disadvantage of poorly-resourced countries. Health freedom advocates were therefore delighted that the 77th assembly did not adopt the draft. Yet similar violations continued in the run-up to the 78th assembly in May 2025. On 15 April 2025, which was the last day of negotiations for the Pandemic Agreement, the European Union (EU) insisted on adding last-minute footnotes to the technology transfer provisions to the Pandemic Agreement to ensure they would only take effect “as mutually agreed”. It is widely held that the EU did this to protect the so-called intellectual property rights of its large pharmaceutical industry, thereby undermining the spirit of the beneficiary conditions within the Pandemic Agreement. In effect, this is a great loss to the countries of the Global South, who have strongly advocated for a pandemic agreement which promotes equity in access to technology.
Furthermore, Dr Behrendt explains that in the run-up to the 78th assembly, it became publicly known that the WHO Secretariat intended to get the draft Pandemic Agreement adopted through consensus rather than through formal voting procedures outlined in Article 19 of the WHO’s constitution, prompting Prime Minister Robert Fico of the Slovak Republic to call for the WHO to adhere to its own legal procedure by ensuring a formal vote.
According to Reuters, a statement by Fico said that the WHO director-deneral Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had called him and asked him not to demand a vote. Said Fico: “I reiterated that the Slovak delegation is bound by the Slovak government’s instructions to demand a vote on the pandemic treaty.” Reuters further reported that there was no immediate response from the WHO on Fico’s statement.
Nevertheless, on the first day of the 78th assembly, the WHO’s Committee A voted in favour of the draft Pandemic Agreement. The following day, the plenary of the assembly met to consider the draft, but did not vote, apparently relying on the outcome of the vote of Committee A the previous day to adopt the agreement.
I am not adequately acquainted with the role of Committee A as distinct from that of the full assembly, but Article 19 of the WHO constitution does not make provisions for the adoption of a treaty by consensus, but only by a two-thirds majority. I would have thought that the plenary would have conducted the vote to meet statutory requirements, but my contacts are emphatic that this kind of thing is rampant in the UN system. Be that as it may, the question still remains as to whether a practice is legally acceptable simply because it is rampant. After all, we are talking about the adoption of a legally-binding document, and due process is crucial in legislation.
Yet while all the health freedom advocates I know agree that the 77th assembly violated Article 55 (2) of the IHRs in its vote for the amendments to the IHRs on 1 June 2024, some of those I have spoken to see no violations in the way in which the 78th assembly adopted the Pandemic Agreement. Nevertheless, many of the health freedom advocates I know, whether personally or by way of their publications, hold that the WHO Secretariat created a sense of urgency in the negotiations for both the amendments to the IHRs and the Pandemic Agreement, and then side-stepped requisite procedures in the guise of responding to the purported urgency. This might also explain why the draft Pandemic Agreement released on Wednesday 16 April 2025 was clearly incomplete, with Articles 8, 15, 16 and 34 missing from it, and with two versions of Article 13 in it.
The WHO has indicated that its next focus is the negotiations for an Annex to the Pandemic Agreement on a Pathogen Access and Benefit Sharing (PABS) system. The need for an Annex is due to the fact that the INB could not reach agreement on a key article in the Pandemic Agreement. Some health freedom advocates are of the opinion that the WHO decided that instead of delaying the WHA vote again, it would push for the adoption of the draft as it stood to allow the negotiations to continue, but to also force holdouts to agree by adding pressure to avoid an awkward situation where the entire agreement collapses.
In essence, the PABS system is to be designed to facilitate the sharing of pathogens with “pandemic potential”, purportedly to enable pharmaceutical companies to develop “vaccines” in good time while “equitably” sharing the profits or products derived with the states that shared the pathogens with them. Yet, health freedom advocates are pointing out that since the Annex must be negotiated before the Pandemic Agreement is opened for signatures and ratifications, the 78th assembly actually voted for an incomplete document merely for WHO and vested interests to save face, and that this too was unprocedural.
In view of the foregoing reflections, there is an urgent need for WHO to renew its commitment to the democratic principles that had set it apart from other United Nations bodies. Unlike the UN, the WHO does not have a provision of veto power for any nation, and thus is meant to uphold the doctrine of the equality of sovereign states. After all, the UN, of which the WHO is a specialised body, claims to be committed to democratic principles in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If this is true, then commitment to adherence to constitutional imperatives and procedural fairness are sacrosanct and therefore ought not to be violated, since they form the very basis of institutional legitimacy.
Reginald MJ Oduor is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Nairobi and a member of the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group and of the International Health Reform Project, as well as the co-founder of the Society of Professionals with Visual Disabilities.